Even in the United States, land of diversity and individualism, there's still nothing like race and ancestry to imprison you in other people's dumbest assumptions and cruelest distortions.

An American -- American-born, American-bred, American-educated -- is suspected of having committed the mass killing that resulted in the death of 13 people at Fort Hood on Thursday. The killer joins the long list of other Americans who have committed mass killings, the second-worst of them in 1991 in the small central Texas city of Killeen, the after-hour shadow of Fort Hood. But the suspect this time has an Arabic-sounding name. Although it shouldn't, it changes everything. A mass murder, bad enough in itself, becomes cause for mass speculation studded with prejudice.

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman